Tag Archives: tips

If you’re using Windows 7 or 8.1, and you’re sick of being nagged by Microsoft’s pop-up to upgrade to Windows 10, go to the Ultimate Outsider website and download and install their GWX Control Panel. It’s received rave reviews. Cost: gratis. Here’s the full description.

New and Improved Method

Update, April 3, 2016: Steve Gibson, founder of GRC (Gibson Research Corp), has written a great little freeware utility that also blocks upgrades to Windows 10. Steve writes most of his code in assembler, so his utilities are tiny. He calls this newest utility Never10. He’s created a page dedicated to Never10, where you may download it for free. It’s only 81 kilobyes in size and doesn’t require installation on your Windows PC. You need just run it once to turn off upgrades to Windows 10, and run it again to allow upgrades to Windows 10. Short and sweet, it’s just what the doctor ordered.

This clip is just one of many from Jolly Roger Telephone, which is the creation of Roger Anderson. This robot comes close to passing the Turing test. I think that it’s built on an Asterisk phone server (which is Linux-based).

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Tom Tryniski has an unusual hobby. Since 1999, he’s been scanning in old newspapers, converting the scanned images to ASCII text, and indexing that text. According to Wikipedia, “As of September 2014, the site has over 28 million newspaper pages.” Tom has done this all by himself.

Tom’s website home page opens with a brief animated movie (a website design no-no), but his site’s wealth of data is worth the delay. Its search function is excellent. I was able to quickly find decades-old information about old friends from New York state.

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When you want to read an article but don’t have time to sit down and read every word, have your phone’s @Voice Aloud Reader text-to-voice app read the article aloud to you.

First, display the article on your phone (probably in a web browser). Press the Share button or icon, and choose the @Voice Aloud Reader. Allow a few seconds for the @Voice Aloud Reader app to start, load the article’s text, and begin reading.

On my Android 4.2.2 phone, the female voice is remarkably clear. It tends toward a monotone, and occasionally messes up (especially abbreviations), but is quite listenable. Within the @Voice Aloud Reader app, you can pause, rewind, etc., the reader.

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I discovered a method of freeing storage space on my Samsung SGH-T399 Android phone. Podcasts had stopped streaming, probably because the phone had run out of free storage space for caching. How could I create free storage space? I learned that the hidden /mnt/sdcard/.face folder had grown to 2.65 gigabytes and contained 67,000 files(!). I gambled that the facial recognition files contained there were nonessential.

I deleted the /mnt/sdcard/.face folder, then created a new empty /mnt/sdcard/.face folder. Suddenly the phone had 2.65 GB of free storage. Yesssss!

I used a terrific Android app, ES File Explorer, to discover this bloated folder, delete it, and create a new empty one. Its SD Card Analyst tool displays folders sorted in descending order by size. The .face folder was at the top of the list.

Note that the folder named sdcard isn’t actually the physical sdcard. For some reason, Samsung’s Android file system calls this phone’s internal storage folder /mnt/sdcard. The physical sdcard is named /mnt/extSdCard.

A simple fix — short of shutting down and restarting the phone or system troubleshooting — is to temporarily place the phone in Airplane Mode (which shuts down its wireless radio transceivers) and then turn off its Airplane Mode (which starts its wireless radio transceivers). Your phone should connect to the cell site with the strongest signal — which may be different than the site that it was connected to before. Nine times out of ten this works for me.

FireEye and Fox-IT have partnered to provide free keys designed to unlock systems infected by CryptoLocker.

If you have been infected by the CryptoLocker ransomware and all your files have been encrypted without your consent, go to FireEye and Fox-IT’s decryptcryptolocker website post haste. These noble folks seem to have located the CryptoLocker servers that store the unique private keys (called “master decryption keys”) for infected systems and will allow you to decrypt your encrypted files . . . gratis!

I applaud FireEye and Fox-IT. I’m not sure how they were able to locate the CryptoLocker servers. (New randomly-named servers were created every day.) Also, it seems that CryptoLocker’s claim that the private keys would be destroyed after several days wasn’t true, since FireEye and Fox-IT appear to have found the keys intact on one or more CryptoLocker servers. In any case, FireEye and Fox-IT deserve a big round of applause.

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I have a number of small motors whose bearings need occasional lubrication. Paper shredders, impact printers, and tape libraries contain mechanisms that require lubrication with a light oil. Hunter original ceiling fans, assorted locks, hinges, and small electric motors require SAE 10W straight weight, non-detergent oil. Good luck finding it locally! Home Depot, Lowes, and Sears stores have driven out the small hardware stores that used to carry this stuff.

The popular “3-In-One” brand oil in tbe red, black, and white squeeze can is about 20W, but it contains detergent, which is bad news in most applications in which you can’t flush, filter, or drain the old oil with the dirt particles held in suspension. Those particles will abrade bearing surfaces in simple machines.

I found exactly what I needed on Amazon. It’s La-Co 4 ounce Zoom spout oiler 79704G. It contains four ounces of pure 10W non-detergent oil. It’s packaged in an easy to use squeeze bottle with a tiny extendable tube for precise application. Cost is about $4.00. It’s sold by Pandora’s OEM Appliance Parts. It was delivered to my door within a couple days of my order.

While watching a Youtube video clip about the recovery of a stolen bicycle, I learned about Burner, a smartphone app that allows a smartphone user to temporarily mask his or her phone number with an alias phone number. It’s available for iPhones, but not yet for Android phones. (originally published on 31 December 2012. 9 July 2014: Burner is now available for Android phones, as well as IOS.)

Theft recovery seems like a perfect use for telephone anonymity. The victim, who’s a Portland, Oregon resident, responded to a Seattle Craigslist for sale ad for what seemed to be his stolen bike. He used Burner to make his phone calls appear to originate in Seattle.

Are you ever late for appointments? When traveling to rendezvous with someone, you may now use Glympse.com to keep your friend or business contact apprised of your geographical progress. Portable apps for IOS, Android, and Windows Phone smartphones are available.

Your friend / business contact (and no one else) will be able to track you from any Internet-connected web browser as you approach your rendezvous point. You can also periodically securely share your location via email, SMS text messaging, Facebook, or Twitter.

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Occasionally, for no apparent reason, my Android phone refuses to accept a battery charge. (originally published 15 February 2014)

Here’s the only way I’ve found to fix this problem on my Samsung Insight II SGH-T679 with Android 2.3.6 Gingerbread phone:

Remove charger

Turn off phone

Remove battery

Remove SIM card

Remove SD card

Wait at least 3 minutes. (I’ve had to wait as long as 60 minutes.)

Replace SD card

Replace SIM card

Replace battery

Turn on phone

Plug in charger

This reset procedure works for me. It may or may not work for you. (8 Oct 2014) It also works for my new SGH-T399 phone.

Update

7 August 2014 This may or may not be a coincidence, but I’ve found that since abandoning third-party battery chargers and returning to a Samsung manufactured charger, my phone’s battery behaves better, without loss of charging function.

I’ve also stopped buying third-party batteries. They’ve been short-lived. I found what seems to be a genuine Samsung battery on Amazon. The combination of genuine Samsung battery and Samsung battery charger seems to provide both longer battery discharge times and better charging behavior.

I’ve not needed to resort to the charging system reset procedure since installing the genuine Samsung battery and using the genuine Samsung charger.

Last week I cloned a Xubuntu 12.04 system disk from an old IDE drive to a brand new drive. Acronis True Image reported that the process succeeded, but Xubuntu refused to boot from the new drive — the PC simply restarted without booting Xubuntu. I uttered a sound that you don’t want to hear from the guy who’s upgrading your system: “Uh-oh.”

Why it won’t boot
I learned in https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UsingUUID that Ubuntu relies upon disks’ uuid (Universally Unique Identity) numbers. Apparently Ubuntu first loads the Grub start menu. Grub reads /boot/grub/menu.lst, which uses the disk’s uuid number to define the disk on which the operating system to be booted is stored. Since the new disk’s uuid differs from the old disk’s uuid, we must edit /boot/grub/menu.lst.

A quick fix
Eventually I found a simple alternative to manual editing. The Lubuntu-based open-source Boot Repair CD repaired the problem with just one click. It takes a while to load but it’s a great little tool that claims to repair Windows boot problems as well. I’ve added it to my toolbox.

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Last weekend a customer presented me with what he thought was a five-year old Dell Optiplex. It was actually a twelve year old Dimension 4500 with Microsoft Windows XP Home and was agonizingly slow. In any case, XP was rapidly approaching its end of life.

I feared that this PC was also at its end of life. Dell.com reported that it had shipped in 2002(!), and its hard drive SMART indicated over 50,000 power-on hours. Still, its CPU was a 2 GHz Pentium 4, so I decided to beat this dying horse a bit more before putting it out to pasture.

This desktop PC contained two 512 MB DDR memory modules. Both Dell and Crucial.com advised that this motherboard couldn’t address more than 1 GB of memory. Google revealed that in fact this motherboard could accept two 1 GB DDR memory modules, so I installed two 1 GB DDR memory modules, for a total of 2 GB. The BIOS reported 2048 MB total memory. Yesss!

Unfortunately the PC wouldn’t boot from a Xubuntu 12.04 live DVD. No wonder: this PC contained a CD-ROM drive, not a DVD drive. It also could not boot from a USB drive.

No problem. I booted from a Ubuntu minimal install CD, installed it, and used the sudo get-apk install xubuntu-desktop command to download hundreds of megabytes and install Xubuntu 13.10. (I don’t know how — or if it’s possible — to install anything but the newest release with the get-apk command.) It ran, but the display would occasionally blank and log me off. Not good.

I wanted to try Xubuntu 12.04, not 13.10, but how could I do this on a PC with only a CD-ROM — not a DVD — drive? I found a clever program called plop boot manager that installs on a boot CD-ROM, which in turn passes control to a boot thumbdrive in a USB connector. I created a plop CD-ROM and a Xubuntu 12.04 boot thumbdrive. It worked! Xubuntu 12.04 runs nicely on this old Dimension 4500.

Now I just need to replace its 50,000 hour hard drive. Maybe it’ll run for another twelve years.

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Gordon Welchman was an Englishman who, while working on decoding German messages at Bletchley Park during World War II, invented traffic analysis. His idea was that even if one couldn’t decipher message contents, just tabulating who messaged whom, when, and how frequently, lent knowledge about the enemy.

After the war, he emigrated to America, where he became an American citizen and taught the first computer course at M.I.T. He worked for Remington Rand and eventually for the MITRE Corporation, where he enhanced traffic analysis technology and helped develop C3 (Command, Control, and Communication) systems.

Following the publication of his book The Hut Six Story in 1982, which detailed the work of his Hut Six group at Bletchley Park, his security clearance was revoked. This killed his career in intelligence.

Well, both snowboarding and skiing. Reminds me of water skiing. The middle east coast states received buckets of snow this weekend and these New Yorkers made the best of it. Yes, that looks like Broadway in Times Square.

“It re-writes the history of technology.”

I love this parody. It’s a humorous advertisement for your own mail server:

Do you run a government agency but hate complying with the law? Then you need DC Matic, the Hillary Clinton-approved email server!

credit: Written and performed by Remy. Video directed and edited by Meredith Bragg

What’s Hillary hiding? Classified emails? Sure. Evidence of her negligence in Benghazi that led to the murders of US citizens? Of course. Security breaches via assistant Huma Abedin’s Muslim Brotherhood connections? Probably. No, the ticking time bomb in this server is bribery. Maybe treason as well. She’s hiding written evidence of her deals that traded State Department help in exchange for large donations to the Clinton Foundation and large fees for speaking engagements by Bill Clinton.

Both Swope and Obama were elected to office by fools who suffer from chronic white guilt.

In 1969, Putney Swope announced:

The changes I’m gonna make will be minimal. I’m not gonna rock the boat. Rockin’ the boat’s a drag. What you do is sink the boat.

In 2008, Barack Obama bragged:

. . . we are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.

Mr. Obama is trying to transform America, alright. Transform it from a prosperous capitalist economy governed by a constitutional republic to a bankrupt socialist economy governed by a corrupt tyrannical dictatorship. Barack is following Putney’s credo, “What you do is sink the boat.”

The tune, “Slow Down”, is performed on piano and sung by its composer, Larry Williams. He was from New Orleans (of course). The tune, ringing with ninth chords, was released on disc in 1958. I think that the dancers are from a 1950s Hollywood rock & roll movie. Larry also composed Dizzy Miss Lizzy, Bad Boy, and Bony Moronie — classic rock tunes, all. He was born in 1935 and died on this date, January 7, in 1980.

In the mid-1950s, Williams inherited star billing from Little Richard (who’d forsaken rock and roll for religion) at New Orleans’ record label Specialty Records.

While Williams was alive, the Beatles paid their respects by admirably covering Larry’s Dizzy Miss Lizzy, Slow Down, and Bad Boy. I’m amazed that Larry Williams isn’t in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Extra credit assignment: Compare and contrast the Beatles’ cover of Slow Down with Larry Williams’ original. This clip includes the fab four wailing in Liverpool’s Cavern Club: (If YouTube has taken down this video clip, you can hear the same recording with groovy rock and roll clips (sorry — requires Flash) from 1950s America and early Beatles. Sorry for the Flash format.)

I’m delighted to discover that the video of Joni Mitchell’s classic Shadows and Light concert (1980) can be viewed in full (1h 13m) on YouTube. Supporting players are Jaco Pastorius on bass, Pat Metheny on guitar, Michael Brecker on sax, Don Alias on drums, Lyle Mays on keyboards, and The Persuasions. It’s among my favorite videos of a concert performance.

Jaco Pastorius

Jaco was a Fort Lauderdale kid who began playing in rock bands around town in a variety of clubs: She, The 4 O’Clock CLub, The Village Zoo, The Flying Machine, The Button, Bachelors III, Ocean Mist . . . When I first heard Jaco in the early 1970s, he was playing bass for straight-ahead local rock bands. He graduated to more jazz- and fusion- related music and put his unique fretless Fender bass stamp on Weather Report. I’ve heard bass players tell me that they tried to imitate Jaco’s technique, but gave up trying; they claim that Jaco changed what it meant to play electric bass guitar. Jaco’s friend Pat Metheny, who plays a beautiful lead guitar in this concert, is a University of Miami music school graduate.

Jaco seemed to still have his act together when he played this concert. Wikipedia has a good Jaco biography. He had a rapid rise to the top followed by a quick ride back down again. I had musician friends c 1984-87 who were torn up watching their friend Jaco dismantle his life. This Warner Brothers recording artist and Down Beat Hall of Fame member was sleeping on park benches and shooting baskets in a local public park.

Michael Brecker and Don Alias died a few years ago.

This is a classic performance by master musicians who were at the top of their games. Too bad it couldn’t last forever.

According to Rolling Stone magazine, the FCC is considering disciplining NBC for airing an indecent performance on July 6, Miley Cyrus’ “Bangerz Tour”. I watched it. It was provocative, but artful. Bertolt Brecht would have loved the production: live dancers against rear-projection oversized animation with creative costumes and lighting. I loved it. Some of the images, such as Miley riding a giant “Mr. Wiener”, were sexually suggestive.

Click to stream or download full 862 Megabyte video performance

The concert (recorded in Barcelona) reminded me of Madonna’s shows twenty-five years ago. Both performers have acceptable contralto voices, energetic dance skills, and assemble exciting Brechtian spectacles. I love the costuming and choreopgraphy. Shocking? “Bangerz” pushed the limits on prime-time American TV, I suppose. But that week on television, the atrocious performance by the Brazilian football team was truly shocking.

I’d prefer that the FCC take no action on this. They have enough serious issues on their plate already. Censoring art is, in my opinion, a slippery slope for any government agency . . . and I think that this production can be labeled “art”. Here’s the full show (862MB H264 1h 25m mp4 video file, 720 x 404 pixel) for download or streaming:

Click to stream or download full 862 Megabyte video performance

You’ll need a fast Internet connection to smoothly stream this. You might be better to download the file and then play it locally with a good video player such as VLC.

Is it Miley’s performance or just modern low distortion recording technique that for the first time makes John Lennon’s “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” lyrics (at 44m 35s) sound so . . . so . . . clear, logical, and complete?

I’ve worked with integrated circuits (I.C.s) since the 1960s, but haven’t been involved in their manufacture — only their application.

Intel Haswell wafer with a pin for scalephoto: Intel Free PressToday’s integrated circuit manufacture is a high stakes capital intensive business whose players use trade secrets to maintain their market advantage. I’ve never been inside an I.C. “fab” (factory), so it was a treat to find an hour-long presentation by an industry manufacturing engineer on YouTube. The technologies used at nano dimensions are mind-boggling.

Here’s the excellent presentation, in full:

The speaker mentions that lithographic imaging of the mask is now being done at 193 nanometer (nm). As you can see, we’re well above visible light and on our way to x-rays(!). Here’s the electromagnetic spectrum in that region:

Click for full-sizegraphic by: Shigeru23
The presentation is aimed at the layperson and is filled with surprises. For instance, one gigabyte of semiconductor memory can be produced on a flat substrate within the diameter of a human hair. I give it two (gloved) thumbs up.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary. — Steve Jobs

I’m the one that’s gonna have to die when it’s time for me to die, so let me live my life the way I want to. — Jimi Hendrix

I just listened to an excellent interview with Walt Mossberg, who since 1991 wrote a weekly computer industry column for the Wall Street Journal. Walt’s now retired. Leo Laporte, an industry podcaster, coaxes some great stories from Mr. Mossberg.

Walt’s perspective was always that of a user — not a tech freak. Most industry reporters are techies who don’t appreciate that most of us don’t care about the inner workings and secret mechanisms of computers.

Walt speaks a bit about his long relationships with both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. (Walt sat in the passenger seat as Gates, frustrated by traffic, drove his Lexus for miles on the road’s shoulder.)

In the 1970s and early 1980s, I loved ABBA’s music. I was pleased to discover this recent critique, in both spoken and written form. I didn’t realize that ABBA were considered politically incorrect in their home country.

Intelligent Life magazine‘s Matthew Sweet observes that ABBA’s songs progressed from naiveté through sophistication to melancholy. As Matthew says, “Many of their songs are about accepting the failure of relationships”.

Here’s the companion article, Thank You for the Music, by Matthew Sweet, from a recent issue of Intelligent Life. Both the article and the audio clip stem from his visit to Stockholm’s ABBA Museum.

These observations will help you get the most from your swimming. (They’re from Australian podcast Effortless Swimming). Each is a short audio clip of less than ten minutes. (The first truth is that one or two swim workouts a week won’t cut it.)

Now that not just one, but two movies (Breaking The Code and The Imitation Game) have been produced about Alan Turing, it’s time we had a movie about Ada Lovelace. She seems to have possessed an unusual combination of precise reasoning and imagination, strong will, and feminine charm. Plus, she was in the middle of a tug o war between her feuding parents, poet Lord Byron and his wife Anne Isabella.

Why is Ada important? She’s acknowledged to be the first computer programmer (c 1840!). Like Mozart and Turing, her life was tragically cut short at a young age. I propose this biopic today because it’s Ada Lovelace Day!

If you’re using Windows 7 or 8.1, and you’re sick of being nagged by Microsoft’s pop-up to upgrade to Windows 10, go to the Ultimate Outsider website and download and install their GWX Control Panel. It’s received rave reviews. Cost: gratis. Here’s the full description.

New and Improved Method

Update, April 3, 2016: Steve Gibson, founder of GRC (Gibson Research Corp), has written a great little freeware utility that also blocks upgrades to Windows 10. Steve writes most of his code in assembler, so his utilities are tiny. He calls this newest utility Never10. He’s created a page dedicated to Never10, where you may download it for free. It’s only 81 kilobyes in size and doesn’t require installation on your Windows PC. You need just run it once to turn off upgrades to Windows 10, and run it again to allow upgrades to Windows 10. Short and sweet, it’s just what the doctor ordered.

Installing two or more application programs on a PC can chew up your time as you wade through web pages, download prompts that don’t always work, and questions and answers. Now ninite.com (http://ninite.com/) does this tedious work for you. I’ve tried it on a few PCs and it’s worked flawlessly. Install everything in one easy step on your brand-new Windows 7 PC!